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I get a lot of questions asking me about our wait for Malley, and why the wait has increased. I don't really know the answer. It is not black and white, and there are a lot of contributing factors.

There is a lot of talk about how China is trying not to draw attention to the fact that they have child abandonment "issues" especially during the Olympics while all the world is watching. This article does some to explain why our wait has increased, but when you balance it with this post it is hard to know really what to believe about what is actually going on. I do find it sort of interesting that the first article was in a Chinese newspaper DURING the Olympics. The second link may not make a lot of sense to anyone that hasn't followed Chinese adoptions "behind the scenes," but it basically says that the cutoff date for referrals this month split the dates that the Chinese are normally off for Chinese New Year (2 weeks). So, if no one was there working, how were there referrals in that date range. The post goes on to propose that the reason for this is that the Chinese did not want to have a large referral batch during the Olympics.

The second article goes on to mention that the process could "possibly" speed up now that the "orphanage donation" has increased; as this might be more of an incentive to get children paper ready if they will benefit from a larger donation because of it. It is precisely this type of thing that infuriates me. According to the author (we have no way of telling how accurate they are) China has plenty of children, they are just not "paper ready". So, these children are living in orphanages a lot longer than is absolutely necessary. And, in the author's opinion, when the donations increase, so will the number of paper ready children. It's just sad.

I've already said that the whole "wait" is a muddy, difficult process that I will probably never understand. Is it the economy? Is it China "saving face"? Is it orphanage directors hungry for more money (and maybe this is good for the kids)? I don't know. But, I do know this: the wait time has now grown to 30 months ( 2 1/2 years). We've been logged in for 18 months, so we have at the very least, a year to go. If the CCAA is only going to refer 3 days a month, it'll be a while no matter what.

There is no need to comment y'all, I'm just thinking out loud. I'm just trying to read and educate myself about the world of Chinese adoptions. I like to put some of my findings here. I don't know why, or at least, I probably couldn't explain why without writing a book.